Printers, such as inkjet desktop printers, are now capable of making high quality images. To realize this capability, however, a user must be able to properly configure the printer driver software for the appropriate settings, as directed by either the printer manufacturer or the media manufacturer. There is every indication that most users do not appropriately set the driver settings for the media, which makes optimal printing very difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. Furthermore, to obtain consistent, reliable color, the printing path should be color managed according to the most modem techniques. If a color profile is applied for a driver setting different than the setting for which the profile was built, the results are unpredictable at best.
Several high-end software products are available on the market today which allow a knowledgeable user to color manage their images. Adobe Photoshop versions 4.0 and later, for example, permit the use of “plug-ins” which a customer can use to transform images from one color space to another. Press Ready, also by Adobe, permits colorimetric rendering intents for proofing operations. None of these applications, however, automatically select the correct color transforms based upon image source or the user's printer. It is up to the user to correctly identify the profiles to be used. Furthermore, it is still up to the user to configure his or her driver correctly.
Image color matching (ICM) version 1.0 and 2.0 have been incorporated into Microsoft Operating systems Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT 4.0 and later. These systems take advantage of the operating systems embedded Graphics Device Interface (GDI) to correctly manage color between monitors and other output devices. Despite its capability, ICM has been implemented only sporadically in most applications and at times incorrectly. As a result, vendors of both hardware and software have not fully embraced ICM as a solution to their color management needs. As with the imaging applications mentioned above, ICM has no capabilities to automatically set printer driver options.
Printer Drivers by original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) also incorporate color management. For instance, by assuming an input image is in sRGB color space, a printer manufacturer may implement color look-up tables (LUTs) within their printer driver to give excellent reproduced color. This solution, however, has two distinct disadvantages. First, these LUTs will ordinarily be optimized for only one paper formulation—images on other papers will be compromised. By specifying multiple paper types, a printer OEM can additionally support all of their media at the expense of some added complexity. The HP895 driver, for example, supports 16 media types. For obvious reasons, the OEM printer drivers do not ordinarily offer any LUTs optimized for competitive media.
The second disadvantage is that the driver must assume a color space for the image. Because of its location in the imaging chain after GDI, a printer driver has little or no knowledge of the source of the image. Metadata, that is, descriptive data associated with an image, is not persistent beyond the application layer. The need for this assumption is the impetus behind support for a “generic” color space such as sRGB. Despite this support, however, many interpretations of sRGB continue to exist and input devices frequently report sRGB images with different code values. No accommodations for different color spaces (and different input sources) are possible at the driver level without additional user input specifying the input device.
Beyond these problems with color management, the device driver user interfaces still require the user to make the correct selections. All of the color management built into the LUTs is worthless if a user selects the incorrect media or neglects to make any changes beyond the defaults. Because printer drivers are written to be a generic solution for all of the user's needs, multiple settings would need to be made available for user input; consequently, this dependency on the user persists. Some printer drivers exacerbate this problem further by providing confusing, inconsistent, or highly technical options to the user.
As a result, color management tools are (1) out of the reach of typical imaging software applications, and (2) too complicated for most consumers to understand and use. Furthermore, color management systems embedded into operating systems, such as Windows, have been used too inconsistently to provide optimum results and do not provide the ability to change driver settings. What is needed is a way for automating driver setting and color management for the user while requiring very little user intervention.